The Fragility of Universal Moral Vocabulary

Philosophics — Philosophical and Political Ramblings · Dec 6, 2025 · 25m

This academic essay by Bry Willis presents a fundamental critique of normative ethics, arguing that its aspiration to establish universally valid moral principles is impossible due to linguistic and conceptual limitations. The author contends that the major Western moral frameworks, including virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and contractualism, all rely on the faulty assumption that core moral vocabulary holds stable, context-independent semantic content. This flaw is systematically explained through the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), which demonstrates that moral…